Seakettle

There's something about the weathered texture and classic muted red that I love in salvaged brick. Growing up, we always had plenty of it around due to the stockpile my dad accumulated from the neighborhood chimneys toppled by the Northridge earthquake. This Valentine's Day I stole a brick from the remnants of that stockpile to fashion into a gift for Jennifer. Knowing that she loves typographic details, I decided to carve our initials into one face of the brick. [...]

Is anyone else crazy busy these days?! I have tons of recent projects that I'm so excited to share, including my brother's upcoming wedding, new stationery for the shop, and culinary adventures with our grapes and zucchinis! But since they aren't quite ready for posting, I thought I'd share a throwback project. [...]

The Good Friday tornado in the suburbs of St. Louis, MO, leveled homes, blew off roofs and walls, flipped cars and uprooted trees. Thankfully my family, friends and the rest of the community survived. My hometown is putting the pieces back together and, even though I'm in LA, I want to help. [...]

This Halloween, Jennifer and I dressed up as American Gothic. When dressing up as a famous painting, a large, gaudy frame is essential to the outfit. However, large frames are quite expensive, and even if you have a suitable frame, you may not want to endanger it by dragging it around Halloween parties or neighborhood trick-or-treating. To solve this problem, we built a large, inexpensive frame from surplus baseboard we had laying around. [...]

Note: This is Greg's first Seakettle post! Since he was completely responsible for every step except number 11, I figured it would be easier for him to explain the shelves than for me to transcribe the process. Thanks, Greg! [...]

Sorry for the lack of posts lately! It seems I have a million projects on the to-do list, yet we've been spending all our free time out of town! Speaking of traveling, we've added this new print to our collection: "We don't take vacations, we take adventures." Greg came to this conclusion in Charleston, as I begged to go back to the hotel room for a shower and nap. As a reward for his patience (and as a birthday gift), he now has his motto in print. [...]

Despite my taking 5,000+ photos per year (for fun), our apartment had exactly one photo on display. Pitiful. It isn't even a particularly good one, it just happens to have been framed years ago. Yesterday, I finally changed that. [...]

I am a landlord's nightmare. I have a cat that likes to destroy carpet edges and window screens. I like painting the walls fuchsia (just one, really) and secretly planting flowers on the property. Oh, and I use a lot of nails. Really, really a lot of nails. This doesn't include the curtains that I hung out on our last porch, the chandelier in the ceiling, or the chunky floating shelves. [...]

Ta-da! I recently finished a collection of circles over our bed and am quite happy with the results. We needed something over our low platform bed to break up the big, neutral wall and I was looking for earthquake-friendly ideas (Late night shower of glass and metal? No thanks!). I first spotted "swatch portraits" over at the purl bee and loved them. [...]

I'm a web designer by day, working for a fabulous little company based in South Bend, IN. My coworkers moved into a new office this year and the new space meant many freshly-painted, completely bare walls. After a geeky brainstorming session with the staff, we had plenty of fun ideas. First, we stenciled the corresponding hexadecimal numbers onto the yellow, orange and blue walls (more on this later). [...]